The bug in The Crew that would allow servers to randomly erase player stats is said to be fixed in this patch pack.

The patch for The Crew that is due later this week will fix the stats issue once and for all, but those missing stats from previous games will NOT have them restored.

This is the first major patch to address issues with the game since it was released. The patch will also include new content in the form of a new PvP mode. The new PvP mode is an elimination race that includes 10 new tracks. Also four new faction missions will be part of the patch as well.

The patch includes a laundry list of other fixes for the game. We are not sure how much this is going to impact the game for those that have it or those that are considering buying, but it could not be any worse off than it was at launch.

As Ubisoft releases The Crew today in North America, we find that title which has experienced a number of issues and delays, has another big surprise in store for those who take the plunge and buy the game this week.

The promised “Companion App” for The Crew will not be released till “early 2015” according to the announcement printed on the actual game case. What this means is that the companion App which allows players to explore the full world map via the mobile device, as well as tweak and adjust their cars, and unlock in-game content, as was to be a big part of the game itself, is apparently not yet ready for prime time. Ubisoft and developer Ivory Tower have yet to clarify the exact situation as to why the Companion App will not be released at the same time as the actual game.

The news of the companion App not making the game’s release seems to be par for the course with The Crew. It just seems no matter how much Ubisoft and Ivory Tower have tried to get things right with this game, it continues to be plagued with problems and setbacks. (It is no wonder that the decision was made to not release early review copies to the media with the excuse that the game takes much more time to create an accurate review of the game because of the amount of content.)

Had to say what Ubisoft is going to end up with for the first release of The Crew. There was much talk about Ubisoft wanting to make The Crew the cornerstone of its new racing franchise, but it does not seem that it is shaping up as the publisher would have hoped. We need to play around with the end product before we pass judgment, but features missing because the Companion App was not ready for release, will make it impossible to give the title any review that does not lead to an incomplete till it is released.

The third game from the list is a driving game called The Crew and the game just loaded on our Uplay account a ahead of launch. This is not an unusual practice, but we were not too happy to learn that it won't let you play the game just yet. It just lets you download it and wait for the 2nd, which is a nice way of keeping server load down. According to the official game website, the game officially launches on the 2nd of December worldwide and this 16GB game doesn’t let you access the online content of play until then.

Buying a Geforce 900 or 700 series graphics card lets you choose between the Far Cry shooter, Assassin's Creed sneaker and puzzler, or high speed driving in The Crew. The circle will be completed in a few hours when the game official becomes available to the PC users.

Ubisoft has been getting a lot of flak over Assassins Creed Unity performance issues and now the company has released a patch, less than two weeks after the game came out. The game is 12 days old and the company is getting ready to roll out the third patch.

Patch 3 includes over three hundred fixes designed to improve your Assassin’s Creed Unity experience. The downside of the patch is that it won't really address the framerate issues. The company plans to try to fix it in the later patch. That is not the news we have been expecting, but at the same time, some improvements might be noticed with the installation of Patch 3.

You can expect stability and performance improvements, including a fix for numerous random crashes in Campaign and Co-op modes, specific frame drops due to improved task scheduling as well as tweaked performance for Reach High Points (Synchronization). The patch addresses various gameplay fixes, including improvements in AI and Crowd algorithms as well as Matchmaking, Connectivity and Replication and Menus and HUD. Ubisoft has included mission tweaks in Campaign and co-op modes, along with tweaked content, world, progression and difficulty.

PC users get a few specific improvements, including fixed save game corruption in some cases, fixed temporal blur from SLI, fixed graphical corruptions in Character Customization menu fixed crash issues in the same menu. Alt+Enter switches windows correctly, NPC on side monitors show correctly and Minor UI improvements.

Ubisoft is working hard on Patch 4 and they will give us an update in the coming week. We are starting to think that there won't be a magical patch that can significantly improve the framerate and you will still need high end hardware in order to play at a decent framerate with high detail settings.

Ubisoft seems to be taking a page from Bungie’s book and announcing that it will not be sending out early review copies of The Crew. Instead reviews will have to wait till the servers are turned on 11am GMT Monday and of course they have a copy of the game to review.

The developers caution that because of the design of the game and the massive environment that the game has to offer, it take a lot more than the typical time reviews put into a game to play enough of The Crew to be able to form an accurate opinion of the game. So reviews that come out first might not be the clearest indication of the full potential of the game.

Also, because the servers are not yet switched on for the release version of the game and the game requires a constant connection to the server, those who might obtain an early copy are not going to be able to play them will 11am GMT Monday.

Ubisoft has confirmed that an Open Beta for The Crew which is the much delayed and much alpha tested (and closed beta tested) driver. The Open Beta will run from November 25th to the 27th for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

The Open Beta will include the full map of the United States with five regions open and available for play. PvP lobbies in the Midwest and East Coast regions will also be accessible and customization will be available in five spec classes, Street and Dirt.

With the upcoming release of the game on December 2nd in North America and December 5th in Europe, this Open Beta will be the last chance to play the game prior to release. Testing on The Crew started way back in July after the game was delayed. It was again delayed with more testing, but apparently now we must be pretty close to release.

Ubisoft is claiming that the reason that its latest Assassin’s Creed game was so rubbish was because of AMD and Nvidia configurations. Last week the Ubisoft was panned for releasing a game which was clearly not ready and Ubisoft originally blamed AMD for its faulty game. Now Ubisoft has amended an original forum post to include and acknowledge problems on Nvidia hardware as well.

Originally the post read “We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin’s Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations. This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available.”

However there is no equivalent Nvidia-centric post on the main forum, and no mention of the fact that if you own any Nvidia card which is not a GTX 970 or 980. What is amazing is that with the problems so widespread, Ubisoft did not see them in its own testing before sending it out to the shops. Unless they only played the game on an Nvidia GTX 970 and did not bother to test it on a console, it is inconceivable that they could not have seen it.

They reminded us that high frame rates, e.g. 60 FPS, gives users an assurance that the game should never drop below 24 FPS and stutter, while the 30 to 40 FPS games might drop below the magical 24 FPS threshold. Not everyone agreed with us - with some even threatening to stop reading Fudzilla, since we broke their hearts by questioning their 60 FPS belief system.

The game got Patch 2 three days ago and Ubisoft warned that even with this 792MB patch users may still experience frame rate issues that have been reported since the release of the game, along with some performance glitches.

Ubisoft is preparing patch number three, while the first two have already been deployed for PS, Xbox and PlayStation 4. The last patch wants to address Arno getting stuck in certain areas, such as hay charts, they want to fix AI and crowd related issues, co-op play issues, menus and HUD issues as well as general stability. Patch two was supposed to address these issues too.

Earlier patches have addressed some of the graphics issues especially the ones that were affecting certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations, SLI or Crossfire Systems. Here is the complete list what to expect from the patch three that we expect sometimes in this week.

Here is what Ubisoft claims it will be the focus of patch three:

Gameplay: this includes bugs like Arno getting stuck on certain areas of the map (including a few more hay carts), problems with getting into/out of cover, character animation bugs, and general camera problems

AI & Crowd: in this category are problems with NPC animations, crowd events, and crowd stations, NPC navigation issues, as well as bugs related to NPCs detecting Arno’s activities in various situations

Matchmaking & Connectivity: this covers a number of issues related to co-op play, including bugs with joining games in-progress and problems that happen during host migration

Menus & HUD: fixes in this category will address missing details in certain menus, problems with some of the mission objective and co-op update pop-ups, localization inconsistencies, as well as some of the issues with menus and pop-ups overlapping each other

General Stability: this includes fixes for a number of crash situations we've identified in both campaign and co-op modes.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is definitely in hot water. It has a number of glitches and PC enthusiasts are not happy about the frame rate they are getting.

We found out more disturbing news when it comes to digital distribution. Over the years we learned to love Steam. You would buy a game, punch in the code in Steam and redeem the game. We are pointing this out as most PCs nowadays don’t have an optical drive and having all games at one place such as Steam makes sense.

Then came EA Games with its Origin tool that forces users to install it for some of its games like Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 or Titanfall - and we installed and used this one. Now Ubisoft wants you to use its uPlay tool and so far we’ve used it for Far Cry 3 and yesterday for Assassin's Creed Unity. We will have to use it again soon for Far Cry 4 and one can clearly see a FPS-liking pattern here.

Shortly before Assassin's Creed Unity officially launched, Ubisoft pulled the game from Steam and shortly before launch it got it back again. We are sure what Valve charges Ubisoft for its services, there is such thing as a no free lunch and Ubisoft wants to make its own platform stronger.

One key advantage Steam has over Origin store or uPlay is ability to stream games to other machines, kind of what Nvidia is doing with Shield Tablet but this one is GPU independent and works with AMD kit too. In the short term there is no solution in sight, you will have to live with multiple game stores, multiple accounts and waste more time with every installation, as this is what publishers want.

A lot of people have complained about the Assassin's Creed Unity performance on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and on the PC. TweakTown's Anthony Garreffa, the chap with the Google glasses, claims that he is "absolutely disgusted at the performance of the game", despite the fact that he has a Core i7-4930K and two GeForce GTX 980s in SLI.

Techreport has also collected a lot of reports where people rant about the low performance. They quoted a Shotgun magazine writer who reported 30 to 40 FPS with Core i7-980X system with a Radeon R9 290X and 8GB of RAM. We have to admit that the fact he uses a processor launched in Q1 2010 doesn’t help, but the graphics should be fast enough. There's a nice collection of all Unity glitches here.

Last night Fudzilla downloaded this 40+ GB game via Uplay and we gave it a try. We had a modest setup, including a Core i7 4790, 8GB of Patriot Memory, Geforce GTX 980 at default clock, OCZ Radeon R7 SSD all packed in a Shuttle SZ87R XPC. Over here we really like small rigs and the Fudzilla team uses a number of frugal Intel NUC, Zotac mini PCs and Shuttles, so you can see a pattern here. We also got 30 to 40 FPS on average, but guess what, it looks rather nice.

Geforce Experience will set the game to optimal settings and in our case it would be 1920x1200, TXAA Anti-aliasing, HBAO+ Ambient Occlusion, Environment quality at Ultra high, Soft Shadows (Nvidia PCSS) and texture quality at Ultra high. For the chaps who prefer AMD, we have a Radeon 290X that runs the game at high settings too, but just not in this 500W PSU Shuttle SZ87R XPC we used for the initial test. Downloading a game that is two times 40GB+ takes time, you know.

With these ultra-high settings the game runs on average 30 to 40 FPS and we found this sufficient. It doesn’t stutter and in case that you prefer FPS to quality, you can easily degrade the quality and increase the frame rate to more than 60 FPS. For some reason people believe that you need 60+ FPS to have a nice experience, but the human brain + eye combination can get an illusion of a moving picture at much less, i.e. 24 FPS in movies. European TVs operate at 25FPS, but many gamers claim they need more.

The GPU industry convinced everyone that 120 FPS with 120 Hz refresh rate is necessary, or even 144 FPS at 144 Hz but most people would have difficulties to see the difference between 40FPS and 60 to 120FPS. This believe came with the lack of demanding games where you had a high-end GPU that could render any game at full HD 1920x1080 at highest settings at over 60 FPS. Now in the dawn of 4K monitors, we have four times the pixel to render and 60Hz as a maximum refresh rate. All of a sudden 60Hz and 60FPS would be a minimum to run it synchronised.

I was unhappy with some of the gameplay as apparently this French guy can climb the walls at a rate that would put Spiderman to shame. It is often unclear what the game designers want you to do. In case you need to run, it's hard to estimate how long and where are you supposed to run, and if you should pick a fight or leave. Still, we just tried it, so we will give it some time. The graphics are magnificent, but the characters do look better on Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. Despite the fact that according to Clueless Gamer Conan O'Brien, Kevin Spacey has dead eyes, COD and Assassin's Creed Unity look great and are worth trying.